In the movies, aliens never come in peace. They wipe us out and take our place, enslave us, farm us for food, strip the planet for parts, or just destroy the whole thing outright. The scarier ones don't announce themselves at all. They blend in, wear our faces, and live among us unseen. Rest assured, they're always watching. Here, the alien is the one being watched. Six cameras cover his whole small house, inside and out, and the feed is public. Forever. His day is written each morning by the date itself and runs on your local clock. The same day, lived in every time zone at once. Anyone on Earth can watch him, and almost no one ever is. Surveillance without witness. The title was just a joke when I started. What the cameras record is not an abduction. It's a life. He wakes between two and three-thirty every night. Some nights he scrolls his phone in the dark. Some nights he just stands in the light of the fridge, and there's never anything new in it. He waters a plant. He writes in a diary while the cameras read over his shoulder. He rehearses a smile beneath a taped-up note that tells him to be normal. Some nights are worse than others, and none of it is alien. Once a year, there's a cake with one candle. He blows it out and doesn't eat it. Why? If you open a camera and wait, he sometimes lifts his head. How does he know you're watching? One of one. A single self-contained file. It runs whether or not anyone is watching. Especially then. Made over three months using Claude from Anthropic. 2026 / HTML